How to analyze your Lichess games

By Andrian Yarotskyi · 21 October 2026 · 6 min read

Lichess gives every player a full computer analysis of any game, for free. That is a huge help, and also a trap: with the engine one click away, it is tempting to read its verdict and never think about the game yourself. This guide shows how to use Lichess's tools in the order that actually makes you better, and how to get the most out of the computer analysis without letting it do your thinking for you.

Before the engine: your own first look

Open the finished game and, before requesting anything, go through it once on your own. Ask yourself:

Which moves did you hesitate over? Lichess shows the time left after every move, so long thinks are easy to spot.
Where did the game feel like it was slipping away?
Was there a move by your opponent that you did not expect?

Two or three short notes are enough. They give you something to check the engine against. Without them, you learn what the best move was, but not what went wrong in your own thinking.

Requesting the computer analysis

On a finished game, the Request a computer analysis button sends the game to Lichess's servers, which run Stockfish over every move. When it is done you get:

An evaluation graph across the whole game.
Inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders marked in the move list, with the engine's preferred move for each.
Accuracy and average centipawn loss for both players.

You can also switch on the local engine on the analysis board at any time. It runs in your browser and lets you explore lines, which is useful once you know which moments to look at.

Reading the graph: find the turning points

Start with the graph, not the move list. A game usually turns on two to four moments, and they show up as clear jumps. Click on each jump to go straight to the position.

Some guidelines:

Ignore small wobbles. A swing from +0.4 to +0.1 is not something a human player needs to worry about.
Look for changes in the result. The moment a winning position became equal, or an equal one became lost, matters most.
Check both sides. If your opponent blundered and you played on as if nothing happened, that missed chance is a lesson too.

Accuracy and centipawn loss, in perspective

Lichess shows two numbers for each player. Average centipawn loss is how much, on average, each move gave away compared with the engine's choice, in hundredths of a pawn. Accuracy turns the same idea into a percentage that is easier to compare between games.

Both are useful for spotting trends over many games. For a single game they say little: one blunder in an otherwise solid game can drag accuracy down, and a game against a weak opponent can look very accurate without being well played. Use them as a thermometer, not as a verdict.

At each turning point: understand, then name it

For each moment you found:

Go to the position before your move. What was the position about? Whose plan was working?
Find what your move allowed. Usually it is one concrete thing: a piece that became loose, a check you missed, a square that became weak.
Look at the engine's move and explain it in one sentence. "It defends the knight and keeps the pin," for example. Use the local engine to play the line forward if the idea is not obvious.
Give the mistake a name: missed tactic, hanging piece, ignored threat, king safety, bad trade, time trouble.

Naming is the step most players skip, and it is the one that adds up. After twenty games you will know whether you mostly lose to tactics, to time trouble or to something else, and that tells you what to train. If the answer is hanging pieces and missed tactics, start with how to stop blundering.

"Learn from your mistakes" on Lichess

After a computer analysis, Lichess offers a Learn from your mistakes mode. It takes you back to each of your errors in that game and asks you to find a better move, giving you a few tries. It is a good habit to use it right after a review: finding the move yourself, rather than just seeing it, makes it stick much better.

Its limit is that it works one game at a time and only right then. The positions you get wrong today are worth seeing again next week, and alongside the mistakes from your other games, because the same kind of mistake tends to come back in different positions. That is the idea behind spaced practice, covered in how to learn from your own chess mistakes.

Keeping notes in a study

Lichess Studies are free notebooks of positions and lines. A simple setup that works well:

One study for your games of the month.
One chapter per game you reviewed, with your notes on the turning points.
One chapter for positions you want to revisit.

Writing a sentence about each turning point in your own words is one of the best ways to remember it.

Checking your openings

Lichess's opening explorer has a tab for the Lichess database, one for master games and one for a single player's games. Looking up your own username shows which moves you play and how they score for you. That is often more revealing than the master database, because it shows the positions you actually reach. Our guide to building an opening repertoire from your own games explains how to read those numbers.

Analyzing many Lichess games together

Lichess is excellent for reviewing a game in depth. It is less suited to seeing patterns across many games: which mistakes keep coming back, which openings keep costing you points, whether last month's work changed anything.

That is where Neochess comes in. You link your Lichess username once, your games are imported and kept up to date, and each game you analyze shows its key moments with the better move on the board and a short explanation. Every mistake from every analyzed game goes into one set of exercises, so the errors you made a month ago come back for practice, not just the ones from today. The opening explorer shows your results in every line you have played, and you can narrow it to a range of dates to see how your repertoire has changed. You only give it your username; it reads the games Lichess publishes for everyone.

You can also export your games directly: your profile has an export option, and every game can be downloaded as PGN to use in any chess program.

A routine for one game

Go through the game alone and note where you were unsure (5 minutes).
Request the computer analysis and find the turning points on the graph (3 minutes).
At each turning point, find what your move allowed and what the better move does (7 minutes).
Name each mistake and write one sentence about it in a study (3 minutes).
Use "Learn from your mistakes" on the game, and save the hardest position to try again in a week (2 minutes).

Twenty minutes, a few times a week, is enough to see clear progress within a couple of months.

Analyze your games with Neochess